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Ebay Shop Scrapes Thingiverse, Sells Designs In Violation of Creative Commons (all3dp.com)
He Who Has No Name writes: A little over a week ago, Thingiverse user Loubie posted Sad Face! to Thingiverse, protesting the use — without permission — of their designs and those of others by JustPrint3D, an Ebay seller marketing physical prints of the designs in question (over 2,000 by some counts). Despite a terse and legally shaky denial of any wrongdoing by JustPrint3D, there are obviously multiple violations of various iterations of the Creative Commons licenses (several forms of the CC license are options for Thingiverse uploaders to assign to their Things when uploading, and one is the default). Now MakerBot itself is wading into the uproar firmly on the side of its users, and has released a statement mentioning potential legal action.
Their Ebay store is empty.
What's the problem? Did the author pick wrong license by mistake — and will they apologize to the folks now harmed by eBay's overreaction?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
"Scraping" refers to "copying the content off of some website". It is adapted from the older term "screen scraping", which is copying the data from someone else's visual presentation of this data. This usually implies that you don't have access to the underlying data in a more convenient form (such as files or a database or an API), so you have to reconstruct it from some source that either wasn't intended to promote the efficient transfer of the data or was actually designed to make that transfer as difficult as possible, for IP reasons.
This was also covered about a week ago on HackADay: http://hackaday.com/2016/02/22... "Most of the uploaded CAD models on Thingiverse are done under the Creative Commons license, which is pretty clear in its assertion that anyone can profit from the work. This would seem to put the eBay store owner in the clear for selling the work, but it should be noted that he’s not properly attributing the work to the original creator. " The only part that he's violating is that there's no attribution.
IMO they are different things. Copying might mean that an employee of the shop downloaded designs from thingiverse and listed them for sale on ebay. Steals or infringes is pretty vague in terms of is actually happening.
It seems reasonable for the author to assume that the audience of this site knows what scraping is, and it is a more precise word for what happened than copying, stealing or infringing. Scraping implies a scripted, automated effort with little human intervention past the point of building the script. There is no selection in terms of, 'hey, this looks neat - I'm going to sell those'; it is a complete replication of a catalogue without intervention.
Anti-trust laws in America prohibit a manufacturer or distributor from fixing prices.
Anti-trust laws do not prevent the copyright owner from fixing prices, however, and they can.
Occasionally copyright owners provide a distribution agreement where 99% or 100% of all profits go to the copyright owner, and the merchant/distributor is only allowed to resell according to the author's policies.
Also, copyright owners occasionally provide gratis copies for special purposes --- for example, pre-release reviews or screeners. Just because there is no fee, does not mean the movie theaters that received these exclusive media can legally make and distribute copies.